Challenges in automated HUMINT processing for situational assessment: Experiences from NATO CIMIC Joint Cooperation

The role of the military has been continuously evolving and expanding beyond traditional warfare. In addition to an increasingly asynchronous battlefield, today's military is involved in supporting peacekeeping, crisis management, and disaster relief, to name just a few. Such activities require intense contact with diverse non-military organizations such as government, police, emergency services, relief agencies, and religious leaders. As a result, the information needed for commanders and other decision-makers must come from a wide variety of sources in a wide variety of formats. Thus, any attempt at fusion of this information requires an underlying system concept that is able to standardize information from a variety of input sources, including device-derived information (sensors) and (multiple) natural language(s), as well as to understand complex context, both static and dynamic, and to be able to deal with measures of uncertainty which may vary from source-type to source-type. This paper presents several lessons learned from the ongoing work of a series of NATO Research Task Groups (which have focused on the changing data and information incorporating structured and unstructured human generated information with device-generated data needs for fusion in increasingly complex scenarios requiring interaction between devices, human-generated information and complex contextual backgrounds. We discuss the differing challenges facing the synergic information processing as scenario complexity grows.